Voicespan

or….How VoIP can help you project a ‘corporate’ image

The Challenge

Starting a business can be a very expensive exercise, with a wide range of up-front costs incurred. These can include stock, premises, staff and a million and one other things. In the past, a trip to your friendly bank manager with a business plan written on a napkin was usually enough to gain the loan necessary to cover these costs. But the recession has changed that. And whether or not the banks should be lending money again, the undeniable fact is that they aren’t easily loosening the purse strings just yet.

So if you need the capital simply to open the doors, what can you do? For those businesses where having a physical shop or office is an absolute necessity, then you’ll need to find the money by hook or by crook. However, if you have a business where customer contact is mainly by phone, then going ‘virtual’ might be just what you need.

The virtual business

Plenty of  ’one-man-band’ businesses operate from home. It’s relatively cheap and easy to have a second BT line installed to gain a business phone number, and ADSL has opened up a wealth of possibilities at a very low monthly cost. More recently, the second line hasn’t been necessary as services like Skype have appeared, offering low cost calls over the internet, and the ability to rent a phone number for inbound calls.

For those out on the road a lot, business address services and telephone answering services can project a professional enough image. The advent of smartphones and affordable mobile data contracts also allows the mobile worker to keep track of important emails, and utilise business-oriented social networking tools such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and others.

However, projecting such a professional image gets harder as the business grows. Having a single phone number for the business is fine, but the desired impression of a office full of hard-working business people falls down if you have to ask the customer to call a different number to speak to your colleague. Therefore, in the past a lot of businesses took the decision to rent an office as soon as they gained employees.

VoIP telephony has given businesses the ability to connect the workforce to a central telephone system even if they are geographically diverse. Using either a physical handset or an application running on their PC/laptop, they can connect over the internet to a centralised telephone switchboard (known as a PBX) and do everything you would expect a telephone extension to do, including making and receiving calls through the PBX, transferring calls between extensions, being part of a ring group, and so on.

Options

At this stage I should point out that the most popular VoIP software, Skype, gives you much that a typical office telephone system would. For very small businesses (i.e. under 5 people) it can be a good introduction into the world of VoIP, although businesses tend to find that they outgrow Skype when they get to a certain size. At that point more centralised systems that can connect to both VoIP circuits and traditional analogue or ISDN lines are more popular. As telephony becomes more core to the business, companies appreciate the presence of an SLA (Service Level Agreement) too. There have been many sob stories of extended Skype outages and withdrawn SkypeIn numbers over the last year or two.

The ’sweet spot’ for when to consider ‘proper’ PBX varies for each company, but at Voicespan we find that in most cases will be when a company has between 5 and 15 employees. The option to utilise a system hosted in a secure data centre is becoming more popular as businesses explore the alternative working practices discussed earlier. After all, should your customers really care whether you and a colleague can see each other as long as you are able to provide the great service/product that they need?

(This post first appeared on the Kent Business Buzz blog)